If you're using PHP 5.5 you can use a generator. This will NOT work in any version of PHP before 5.5 though. From php.net:
"Generators provide an easy way to implement simple iterators without the overhead or complexity of implementing a class that implements the Iterator interface."
// This function implements a generator to load individual lines of a large file
function getLines($file) {
$f = fopen($file, 'r');
// read each line of the file without loading the whole file to memory
while ($line = fgets($f)) {
yield $line;
}
}
// Since generators implement simple iterators, I can quickly count the number
// of lines using the iterator_count() function.
$file = '/path/to/file.txt';
$lineCount = iterator_count(getLines($file)); // the number of lines in the file